Vijitha Gottumukkala
Cary,North Carolina
Summary
Senior technology leader specializing in cloud migration and DevOps practices, with a focus on transforming enterprise platforms in regulated environments. Skilled at implementing automation and governance strategies that drive system reliability, compliance, and operational excellence.
Overview
25
25
years of professional experience
1
1
Certification
Work History
Senior Manager - DevOps & Cloud Transformation Lead
United States Department of Agriculture (USDA)
10.2023 - Current
- Led a structured data center exit program transitioning a large federal application portfolio from on-prem environments into AWS, building on prior experience supporting Azure-based cloud platforms.
- Conducted discovery across legacy environments to establish a validated inventory of applications, infrastructure, and dependencies.
- Reconciled infrastructure scans, CMDB data, and stakeholder input to create a reliable baseline for transition planning.
- Worked directly with application owners to confirm integrations, lifecycle status, and operational requirements before sequencing migrations.
- Applied a formal 6R strategy (Rehost, Replatform, Refactor, Repurchase, Retire, Retain) to determine appropriate transition paths based on architectural fit and mission impact.
- Balanced rapid relocation of stable workloads with targeted modernization efforts, addressing legacy constraints for improved scalability and supportability.
- Identified consolidation and retirement opportunities to reduce technical debt prior to migration.
- Defined phased AWS target environments and standardized landing zones, facilitating consistent onboarding, enhancing security alignment, and establishing operational support models.
- Introduced Infrastructure as Code and CI/CD practices to enable repeatable provisioning and reduce manual configuration risk.
- Implemented GitOps-based deployment workflows using Argo CD, achieving consistent and reliable application states across environments.
- Introduced GitHub Actions to improve deployment reliability through automated validation and controlled release workflows.
- Executed migration waves supported by validation testing and controlled cutover planning to maintain service continuity.
- Defined platform operating principles to align engineering teams on consistent provisioning, deployment, and lifecycle practices across AWS environments.
- Established reliability and performance benchmarks for critical workloads, improving system stability and recovery outcomes.
- Introduced governance checkpoints across migration and deployment activities to ensure alignment with security and audit expectations.
- Aligned engineering practices with federal compliance requirements, embedding controls into delivery workflows to support continuous authorization.
- Maintained responsibility for production reliability of AWS-hosted workloads post-migration, ensuring stability, performance, and operational continuity.
- Defined and tracked Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and Service Level Indicators (SLIs) to measure system reliability, performance, and availability across AWS-hosted workloads.
- Monitored system health using logs, metrics, and traces, mapping observations to SLIs to proactively identify reliability risks and performance degradation.
- Established post-incident review practices to identify root causes and prevent recurrence.
- Continuously refined alerting and monitoring strategies, improving signal accuracy and reducing operational noise.
- Leveraged SLOs and error budgets to guide reliability improvements and balance system stability with delivery velocity.
- Identified and addressed potential failure scenarios through proactive system analysis and resilience planning, reducing risk of production incidents.
- Introduced AI-informed operational practices to improve early detection of system anomalies and reduce production impact.
- Built event-driven automation workflows for incident response and remediation, improving consistency and reducing manual effort.
- Incorporated predictive monitoring and failure pattern analysis to strengthen proactive reliability engineering practices.
- Enabled self-healing capabilities by automating common recovery actions and operational runbooks.
- Applied AIOps-driven insights to improve signal correlation and support faster, data-informed decision making.
- Supported scalable platforms handling compute-intensive and data-heavy workloads, ensuring reliability under varying demand conditions.
- Coordinated monitoring, performance validation, and operational readiness while retiring legacy data center infrastructure.
- Delivered migration within FedRAMP Moderate environments aligned to NIST 800-53 controls while sustaining ATO posture.
- Embedded compliance, audit traceability, and security validation into delivery workflows to support continuous monitoring and governance.
Senior DevOps Manager
AT&T Services
01.2021 - 10.2023
- Led DevOps and SRE support for high-availability Azure environments, gaining deep visibility into system dependencies, scaling behavior, and operational constraints.
- Supported evolution of large-scale Azure-based platforms serving millions of users, stabilizing legacy-integrated systems and preparing for cloud-aligned operating models.
- Partnered with architecture and product teams to evaluate modernization feasibility and hosting model adjustments within Azure.
- Introduced service-level frameworks to better understand reliability thresholds, capacity needs, and areas where legacy design limited scalability.
- Worked across engineering, operations, and product teams to align release planning, environment consistency, and operational expectations.
- Coordinated globally distributed delivery teams supporting customer-facing platforms and standardized deployment practices.
- Acted as a senior escalation point during major incidents, often uncovering integration and configuration gaps that informed longer-term improvements.
- Strengthened monitoring and observability to improve transparency into application behavior across complex Azure environments.
- Enhanced CI/CD workflows using GitHub Actions, increasing pipeline reliability and minimizing deployment friction.
- Supported GitOps-style deployment models using Argo CD to improve consistency and reliability across environments.
- Defined and monitored SLIs to evaluate system health and reliability trends, improving visibility into performance and availability.
- Contributed to SLO definition and tracking, aligning system behavior with reliability goals.
- Established structured incident response and post-incident review practices, improving root-cause analysis and minimizing repeat production issues.
- Improved alert quality and signal accuracy, reducing noise and enabling faster detection of high-impact issues.
- Prioritized reliability improvements based on customer impact and service criticality, ensuring high-value systems met availability expectations.
- Enhanced signal correlation across monitoring systems, improving the ability to identify high-impact issues quickly.
- Strengthened incident response practices by introducing more structured workflows and integrating automation where appropriate.
- Shifted operational approach toward proactive reliability management, reducing repeat incidents and improving service stability.
DevOps / Cloud Engineering Manager
General Dynamics Information Technology (GDIT)
05.2010 - 12.2020
- Provided hands-on leadership across DevOps and cloud engineering efforts supporting State Medicaid and Medicare systems.
- Designed and operated delivery platforms for HIPAA-regulated environments, ensuring protection of sensitive data across infrastructure and pipelines.
- Implemented security safeguards aligned with HIPAA Security Rule requirements, including encryption, access controls, and audit traceability.
- Built the engineering and automation foundation that enabled later cloud transition initiatives across state programs operating in regulated environments.
- Developed reusable Infrastructure as Code modules adopted across teams to standardize environment provisioning and reduce configuration drift.
- Introduced automated build and deployment pipelines that improved release consistency and reduced cycle times.
- Facilitated transition of programs from manually maintained environments to version-controlled, repeatable infrastructure patterns.
- Enhanced Kubernetes deployments and automation, increasing platform stability and resilience.
- Strengthened visibility into system behavior through structured observability practices.
- Improved overall system resilience by identifying recurring operational gaps and driving targeted improvements.
- Served as a key escalation point during production events, building practical understanding of system behavior and integration dependencies.
Infrastructure and Systems Engineering Leadership
11.2000 - 05.2010
- Held infrastructure, systems, and database leadership roles supporting large enterprise environments. Worked directly with operating systems, networking, storage, and databases in 24/7 production settings. This experience established a strong operational foundation that continues to inform cloud architecture, DevOps automation, and migration strategy.
- Completed day-to-day duties accurately and efficiently.
- Contributed innovative ideas and solutions to enhance team performance and outcomes.
- Worked successfully with diverse group of coworkers to accomplish goals and address issues related to our products and services.
Education
Masters - computer applications
Osmania University
Skills
- AWS (EC2, EKS, ECS, Lambda)
- Azure
- Hybrid Cloud Environments
- Kubernetes
- Docker
- Cloud migration
- Workload transition
- Terraform
- CloudFormation
- Infrastructure as code
- CI/CD Pipeline Design
- GitHub
- Jenkins
- Azure DevOps
- Release governance
- Argo CD
- GitOps Workflows
- GitHub Actions
- Prometheus
- CloudWatch
- Azure Monitor
- OpenTelemetry
- System Health Monitoring
- Alerting Strategy
- Performance analysis
- FedRAMP (NIST 800-53)
- HIPAA
- ATO Sustainment
- Compliance integration
- IAM
- Encryption (In-Transit & At-Rest)
- Audit Logging
- Governance Controls
- POA&M Remediation Support
- DevOps
- SRE
- ITIL
- Agile/Scrum
- Service-Level Objectives
- Release Management
- Cross-Functional Delivery Leadership
- SLO/SLI/SLA management
- Incident Management
- Post-Incident Review (PIR)
- KPI reporting
- Cloud Cost Optimization
- Portfolio Tracking
Certification
- AWS Certified Developer Associate
- Certified Scrum Product Owner
Accomplishments
- Led enterprise-wide transition initiatives by introducing structured workload evaluation and disposition planning, enabling informed decisions on migration, refactoring, consolidation, or retirement of legacy applications.
- Reconciled and normalized fragmented application inventories using infrastructure discovery, operational telemetry, and stakeholder validation to create defensible transition baselines.
- Accelerated transition readiness through standardized automation and Infrastructure-as-Code practices that enabled consistent environment builds and reduced onboarding friction for migrating workloads.
- Improved sustainability of mission-critical platforms by aligning operational practices, deployment models, and architecture patterns with scalable cloud-based operating environments.
- Embedded security and regulatory controls into engineering workflows to support continuous audit readiness across FedRAMP (NIST 800-53) and HIPAA-regulated environments.
- Enabled more predictable transformation outcomes by introducing repeatable evaluation methods, governance checkpoints, and cross-functional review processes.
- Strengthened collaboration between engineering, operations, and business stakeholders by translating technical constraints, lifecycle risks, and operational realities into actionable planning insights.
- Established structured approaches to dependency identification and environment analysis, reducing surprises during transition sequencing and cutover activities.
- Supported executive-level planning by framing modernization efforts in terms of risk reduction, operational resilience, and long-term platform maintainability rather than one-time migrations.
- Fostered adoption of automation-driven delivery and standardized environments, creating a foundation for continuous improvement beyond initial transition efforts.
Work Preference
Salary Range
$160000/yr - $200000/yrTimeline
Senior Manager - DevOps & Cloud Transformation Lead
United States Department of Agriculture (USDA)
10.2023 - Current
Senior DevOps Manager
AT&T Services
01.2021 - 10.2023
DevOps / Cloud Engineering Manager
General Dynamics Information Technology (GDIT)
05.2010 - 12.2020
Infrastructure and Systems Engineering Leadership
11.2000 - 05.2010
Masters - computer applications
Osmania University